


Subjective Idealism: Five Things at the End of the Rainbow

by yunitsa



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Gen, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-20
Updated: 2007-05-20
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:48:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunitsa/pseuds/yunitsa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers through the final episode, and five ways of dealing with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Subjective Idealism: Five Things at the End of the Rainbow

**Author's Note:**

> Headings taken from the Vincent Starrett poem "221B", which I have twisted about a bit to suit my purposes.

_i. who never lived and so can never die_

At the King's Head Inn in Hyde, one of the plonks from C-division is passing around a collection for DCI Sam Williams' funeral. 'He didn't have any family or ought,' she says, shrugging. 'Just us. The guv says we should pull together.'

'Haven't even seen him in months,' Charlie Hartcliff says, mulling over his pint, though he's already put his two quid in. 'Some sort of deep undercover, they say.'

'Is that how he got killed?' asks the new fellow -- freshly transferred from some high-falluting Met training college, one of Morgan's favourites.

'There was some sort of cock-up with a train robbery sting,' Charlie tells him, glad for once to have the upper hand. 'Got ugly. The guv says Williams ran out just as armed backup was arriving, pitched some sort of fit and shot himself.'

'Nerves,' the new guy says confidently. 'Post-traumatic stress.'

'You Morgan's lot and your fancy talk,' Charlie says dismissively. 'Man was bonkers, is all. Should've never been sent undercover.'

'Is that so?' the new guy asks. The next time Charlie looks over at him, he's writing something down in a little notebook.

The week after Sam Williams' funeral, Charlie Hartcliff finds himself controlling traffic. He reads in the papers, though, that DCI Morgan's team is doing great things to reform the Manchester police.

  
_ii. how very near they seem_

'He said he'd made a promise,' Ruth Tyler says.

'Do you know what he might have meant by that?' the counsellor asks gently. She has well-manicured hands, curled idly around a pencil.

'No. But…' She leans forward, suddenly eager. 'He was in that coma for such a long time. Can the mind be just still for so long? Surely he must've done _something_.'

'You mean some sort of fantasy life? Like a dream -- perhaps influenced by what he half-perceived around him.'

Ruth shakes her head. 'I know -- knew my Sam. He was never one to makes things up -- just the cold, hard facts, he wanted. It must have been real, for him to go back.'

The counsellor looks down, writing a few notes to herself. It's a typical case -- family members trying to share their loved one's delusion, to avoid admitting the truth of their illness. Even more difficult, of course, in situations like this.

'Your son was suffering from post-operatic depression, Mrs. Tyler,' she says. 'He was having difficulty readjusting to his life after the coma. He killed himself.'

Ruth Tyler nods, but her eyes are far away. The counsellor makes a note to schedule her for further sessions -- medication, perhaps. 'I should have made him promise me,' Ruth whispers, 'to stay.'

  
_iii. yet how remote_

Sam changes the station, and they ride off bickering into the sunset, and as they turn the corner he is smiling before the music swells, and dies, and everything fades to black.

  
_iv. that age before the world went all awry_

Sam thinks about getting a new flat, but he never gets around to it -- his days are full of investigations, and arguments with Gene, and evenings down at the pub or out at a film or a concert with Annie. Besides, he's almost come to feel at home in the place, and moving would be such a hassle.

He never asks Annie back to share his rickety little bed, and she never hints at it -- they simply go on as they have been, talking together quietly in the canteen and kissing goodnight at her front door. Then she smiles at him, and vanishes into the little townhouse he's never entered.

Sam doesn't get promoted to DCI; none of them ever get promoted, but that's all right, because they work so well just as they are, as a team. Ray can still be a bastard, and Chris can still be too wide-eyed for his own good, and Gene is still Gene, but deep down Sam knows that he loves them all, and he doesn't want them to leave.

On New Year's Eve, they all gather together in the Railway Arms, the pub full of smoke and whisky fumes and laughter. Nelson keeps the drinks coming, and Gene almost takes Sam's head off with a stray dart, and Chris tries dancing on the bar, tragically, before falling into a stupour beneath it.

As the countdown to midnight begins, he finds Annie by his side, and leans down to kiss her, knowing that he will wake up alone again in the morning, his head cloudy and still wearing his clothes, and he will button up his shirt and put on his leather jacket and stumble down to the station, where Gene will take the piss out of him for looking green around the gills, and he'll volley back that at least he's not an alcoholic who drinks a bottle of Scotch with his breakfast, and then they will get back to work, making their city safe.

_It'll be 1974 soon_, Annie had told him once. But it never is.

  
_v. for all our fears_

The first thing Sam does is get himself a new flat. It feels like a big step, and he half-expects the world to vanish around him along with the horrible green flowered wallpaper. Instead he finds himself a spacious unfurnished loft, with stripped floorboards and bare white walls, and a view over the industrial skyline.

He regrets that he can't just go to the IKEA, wonders when the first store will open in the UK, and stops himself just short of reaching for his computer to Google it. He goes to antiques shops and church sales instead, and ends up with something that's still pretty Seventies but at least not so blindingly tasteless and drab.

(About that -- he'd always thought that the colours in old films were just an effect of the technology, not how things were, just like people in WWI didn't really live in sepia tones. But everything here actually _is_ burnt orange and mustard yellow and faded green, and sometimes he wonders what that means.)

He has a comfortable leather sofa by the window, and on off nights he sits there sometimes with the TV and the radio safely off, and reads battered copies of Berkeley and Plato and Kant from the city library. It's a good thing that, just before his head starts spinning, there will be a knock on the door to distract him -- Gene come to drag him out to a case, or Annie wanting to go out somewhere. And sometimes he wonders about the coincidence of that, too.

He has to get used to forgetting things -- things about the world he came from, things about 1973 he'd once learned. He wants to find out more about this time he seems to be stuck in -- to travel, maybe, but somehow it's always too busy at the station, he can never justify taking the time off, and Gene would call him a host of names for it anyway.

But between that and the memories fading, sometimes he sits beneath his burnt orange lamp shade with the night sky beyond the windows, and the whole world seems to constrict itself to just him, just that circle of light. He closes his eyes, and the light is gone. He opens them…

He starts questioning the cases -- not the usual nagging he does, about rules and procedure, but questioning whether what they're doing is making any difference. Because after all -- where is he? Is this really 1973, the 1973 of his parents and the history books? He wishes he had had the guts to look them all up when he was in 2006, to find out if all this was really what had happened, or just some fantasy concocted from the pop-culture junkheap in his head. Because if it is, then does it matter what he does here?

'Of course it _matters_, you pillock,' Gene says when he brings it up after a few drinks. 'There's people walking safe on the streets because of what you do, so don't go pulling some sort of--'

'Midlife crisis?' Sam suggests, his head buried in his arms on the table.

'Poncy rubbish,' Gene says, 'about how none of this is real. It's real enough.' And he thumps Sam on the shoulder when he leaves, not very gently.

But still he wonders. He thinks about the day he came back -- the day he jumped, smiling, so confident that a fall from a building would bring him back where he belonged. It had all been so easy -- saving the team, the pub, the rainbow spreading over the sky as he kissed Annie. So simple and idyllic, like a smoke-stained, shabby, unreformed Heaven. A busy happy cage to house a suicidal madman, with edges made up from the limits of his own mind.

And after fighting with himself about it for nights at a time, turning over scenarios that are each worse than the last, he ends up as always by fighting with Gene.

He's in the station after hours with paperwork spread over his desk, trying to explain to Annie why he's been so distant lately, when Gene strides out from his office. 'What's the matter, Cartwright?' he demands, seeing her stricken face. 'The nancy boy bothering you again? I thought they had rules about that back in Hyde -- "sexual harassment", eh, Gladys?'

'I'm not bothering--'

'He's telling me how we're none of us real,' Annie says unsteadily, not looking at him. 'Again.'

'Well, just think about it, guv!' Sam starts again, unable to help it. 'I _betrayed_ you all, I'd betrayed you from the start, and then I sold you out to Morgan and left you wounded and in danger! And after all that -- what? Sharp word from Ray in the pub -- and pretty mild from him, at that -- and then I get a kiss and we all pile happily into the car and drive off to fight crime together? That's not reality, guv, that's a rosy fucking dream!'

Almost before he's said the last word, Gene Hunt has him by the lapels and is shoving him up against the wall, his face flushed with anger. 'Now you listen to me,' he says, with quiet and deadly emphasis. 'You can sit at home in the dark for the rest of your life and listen to sad music and think about how no one loves you and nothing you do _matters_, or you can just stop bloody _thinking_ for a change and get on with it and do some bloody good work around here! And if you think that you've been given a second chance, or whatever the hell it is, then you had better _make_ something of it.'

Sam's head hits the wall hard when Gene pushes him away, and the door swings shut behind him. He turns to Annie, dazed, and she is backing away from him too, hands twisted together and tears in her eyes. 'Annie…'

'He's right, Sam.'

'But the way it all worked out -- the way you all just forgot everything, and everything went back to normal--'

She shakes her head, the tears spilling over. 'We didn't _forget_, Sam. We just _forgave_ you. You idiot.'

She turns to go, while Sam stands there, and in that second -- because a second can contain a lifetime, if you're trying hard enough -- he thinks about George Berkeley, and Tony Crane in a psychiatric hospital for thirty years, and the rainbow over the Manchester sky. And then he surges forward, spins Annie around and grabs her by the hands, feeling the manic grin spread over his face.

'Let's go travelling, Annie,' he says. 'Let's go to Spain, or China, or Australia -- as far as we can!'

She's looking over his shoulder, and he knows that Gene is standing there, waiting to say something caustic, and he doesn't know what it'll be yet, but he knows that he'll think of something to say in reply. Because his memories are fading and he doesn't know what's coming, but at least he knows his friends and he knows himself, and it's as good as knowing the future.

'All right,' Annie says, smiling at him through her tears. 'All right, wherever you say, I'll go with you. But only if you promise that we're going to come back.'

'All right, we'll all go!' Gene is shouting from his office. 'We'll all go to bloody Spain, because we've just got nothing better to do! Get to work or get out, you bleeding sops.'

'No work now, guv,' Sam tells him cheerfully, releasing Annie's hands. 'Beer o'clock.'

'First sensible thing you've said all day,' Gene growls. He grabs his jacket on his way out of the door, not looking to see if Sam will follow.

As Sam passes his desk, he notices that his calendar is still on last December and he reaches over to rip out the page. It's not perforated enough to come easily, but he gets it off in the end and crumbles it into the bin, feeling the rough paper in his palm and the stale air in his lungs and his life, all mad and impossible and glorious before him.

  
_only those things the heart believes are true._


End file.
